Life In 19x19

http://www.chess.com/news/karjakin-is-o ... match-4133

In another thread someone posted the above link and there were discussions about tournaments formats and whatnot but what caught my eye is this: ''For many of our Western readers, they are more likely to have landed on Go in Monopoly than to have played the game of Go, so a bit of explanation is required.''

The above link is of one of the most respected chess sites. Is this a bit condescending or is it just me?
The reason I'm posting this is because i have come across many chess players (former chess player myself) and showed them the game only to be politely ignored with some deriding comments and in other cases straight on ridicouled. The more educated ones took some of my comments more seriously but i don't think they gave them much thought. Did you guys have similar experiences with chess players. Did they radiate their arrogance so much that you wanted to punch them?

Not sure I understand why you seem to be taking offense. The statement is very likely to be true, and reflects more on the West's lack of interest in and exposure to go than the author's arrogance (which I don't sense at all in the article).

Generally speaking, most people do not want to be condescending. Not intentionally.
This quote and article does not seem to me to be negative towards go.
If someone takes offense, it may be more because of their views and experience.
Don't think too much of it.

I don't actually have much experience with chess players as I don't play the game and don't normally introduce it into conversation. However, two I did come across many, many years ago come to mind.

The first is the guy who first got me to go to the go club at my university. He was the university chess captain. There is a link to that story if you have not heard it before and are interested: http://senseis.xmp.net/?WhyDidYouStartGo#35. He went to one go club meeting in his life - the one he took me to. Clearly Go did not impress him.

The second was a 3d player in UK in the early 70s. I did not really know him except by sight, but knew of him. I don't recall his name but I am sure someone else here will. He was some sort of chess champion: the British junior champion comes to mind, but that may be wrong. Anyway, he was good at chess. When he discovered go he pretty much gave up playing chess. Clearly Go impressed him more than chess.

So here are examples of both extremes. I would assume that there is a continuum between and that we should be neither upset not surprised when we see a chess player's reaction to Go - whichever way it goes.

If you do a little bit of googling you will see that the chess.com editor Peter Doggers is well informed about and appreciative of go.

Just one example: https://xpertchesslessons.wordpress.com/tag/tcec/

There may be chess players who are condescending towards go, but many are positive. The classic example is world champion Emanuel Lasker who was enthralled by it, and his relative Edward Lasker, also a Grandmaster, wrote a book on go. He also tried to follow the still popular dream of going to Japan to study go.

1/7,000,000,000 wrote:"For many of our Western readers, they are more likely to have landed on Go in Monopoly than to have played the game of Go, so a bit of explanation is required."

The above link is of one of the most respected chess sites. Is this a bit condescending or is it just me?

I don't sense any negative feelings in that article, toward Go or otherwise.

As others have mentioned, that statement is actually accurate.
I think the author was just trying to lighten things up a bit,
to notice the Go square in Monopoly, versus Go.

I do not believe any offense was meant in this article. Some Chess players like and are open to GO. I have met some resistance from others. Their loss. One can enjoy both games.

Maybe i might have stumbled across douchebags so I'm a bit defensive. As i state the link was just a cause to discuss the issue.

Perhaps with a mixture of respect and fear ...

Mathematically speaking, Go is indeed far more complex than Chess. Chess AI is already capable of beating the top professional chess players in the world without handicaps.

Go AI is still far far away from achieving this. The best result it has achieved is a 20 point win against a retired - semi-retired 9 dan professional Takemiya Masaki when he gave the Go AI ZenBS a 4 stone handicap.

It is a strong amateur 5-6 dan level. When I play against it seriously, I win probably 50% of the time ... its pretty strong, especially in calculations. However, it still does not seem to be able to play very good "intuitive" moves like humans do ...

Cai GengYang
gengyangcai@gmail.com

I don't buy into this argument. Much less time, research and resources have been spent on go. I get it that brute force might not be the way for go AI (as opposed to chess if i'm not mistaken) but that doesn't mean it's more complex computationally. Also the number of different moves/positions etc. isn't a good indicator of that imho. At least i'm not convinced.

1/7,000,000,000 wrote:I don't buy into this argument. Much less time, research and resources have been spent on go. I get it that brute force might not be the way for go AI (as opposed to chess if i'm not mistaken) but that doesn't mean it's more complex computationally. Also the number of different moves/positions etc. isn't a good indicator of that imho. At least i'm not convinced.

Let's put it this way...

I wrote a decent chess AI just using minimax search with pruning in my second year of college. I was a pretty novice programmer, but the AI was enough to beat my friends, who played chess casually.

At that time, I wouldn't have even known where to start in writing an AI for go.

CaiGengYang wrote:Go AI is still far far away from achieving this. The best result it has achieved is a 20 point win against a retired - semi-retired 9 dan professional Takemiya Masaki when he gave the Go AI ZenBS a 4 stone handicap.

The AI is called Zen; Zen19BS is a human player on KGS who has chosen a similar name for the lols.

1/7,000,000,000 wrote:I don't buy into this argument. Much less time, research and resources have been spent on go. I get it that brute force might not be the way for go AI (as opposed to chess if i'm not mistaken) but that doesn't mean it's more complex computationally. Also the number of different moves/positions etc. isn't a good indicator of that imho. At least i'm not convinced.

Having more moves/positions precisely does mean the game is more complex as that's what game complexity means, or did you not mean complex in that technical sense? Chess's game-tree complexity is about 10^123 whereas Go's is about 10^360. So if Go had just an easy evaluation function as Chess (which it doesn't which is one big reason it is a harder AI problem) then if we assume Moore's law of doubling power every 18 months then given a Chess AI beat the top human in 1997, then a Go AI (if game complexity were the only problem and efficiency didn't improve) will beat a top human around the year 3177.

I have read once, I think that the source was the team having programmed Deep Blue, that the problem with go is the impossibility to attribute a value to a group whose status is not yet certain.
In chess, the minimax algorithm is limited to branches where the computer is ahead of the opponent all the time according to the evaluation function. Branches where the computer is behind, then comes ahead later are ignored to improve the calculation speed.
In go, it is not possible to do so because we can't be sure if a group is going to die or not, thus it is not possible, for many positions, to know who is ahead.

Uberdude wrote:

CaiGengYang wrote:Go AI is still far far away from achieving this. The best result it has achieved is a 20 point win against a retired - semi-retired 9 dan professional Takemiya Masaki when he gave the Go AI ZenBS a 4 stone handicap.

The AI is called Zen; Zen19BS is a human player on KGS who has chosen a similar name for the lols.

1/7,000,000,000 wrote:I don't buy into this argument. Much less time, research and resources have been spent on go. I get it that brute force might not be the way for go AI (as opposed to chess if i'm not mistaken) but that doesn't mean it's more complex computationally. Also the number of different moves/positions etc. isn't a good indicator of that imho. At least i'm not convinced.

Having more moves/positions precisely does mean the game is more complex as that's what game complexity means, or did you not mean complex in that technical sense? Chess's game-tree complexity is about 10^123 whereas Go's is about 10^360. So if Go had just an easy evaluation function as Chess (which it doesn't which is one big reason it is a harder AI problem) then if we assume Moore's law of doubling power every 18 months then given a Chess AI beat the top human in 1997, then a Go AI (if game complexity were the only problem and efficiency didn't improve) will beat a top human around the year 3177.

Moore's law will fail in about 15-20 years...

Krama wrote:Moore's law will fail in about 15-20 years...

The opposite could be true: the rate of improvement could be increasing -- Singularity essay (2001).